Lifehacker's go-to food writer Mark Bittman offers a list of stale, uninspired (and expensive) pantry items you might think about tossing for fresher cooking this year, and what to replace them with. For example:

OUT Bottled lemon juice.

IN Lemons. Try buying six at a time, then experiment; I never put lemon on something and regret it. (Scramble a couple of eggs in chicken stock, then finish with a lot of lemon, black pepper and dill; call this egg-lemon soup, or avgolemono.) Don't forget the zest: you can grate it and add it to many pan sauces, or hummus and other purées. And don't worry about reamers, squeezers or any of that junk; squeeze from one hand into the other and let your fingers filter out the pips.

All of Bittman's suggestions revolve around the idea of keeping only the true pantry essentials hanging around, and using the inexpensive tools of a home cook (oil, vinegar, onions, garlic, and, most often, your hands) to fill their place. Those in colder climates, of course, can't always depend on a wealth of fresh stuff all year round, but most of the fresher replacements for overpriced kitchen stockers are available to anyone. In general, though, it's a good time to run through and toss the spices and boxes that you can't remember buying; if you re-stock all at once, it's easier to remember when you next need to freshen up. Photo by box of lettuce.

Like any wiki-style site, Foodista isn't the ultimate authority on any one recipe. But the collaborative food site makes for an interesting, helpful read on food. The site's entry page has you search for food you're looking to make, or at least learn about, and you can edit instructions and add or subtract ingredients. Each dish carries related Flickr photos and related blog and WIkipedia posts, and you can embed auto-updating recipes into another page. What makes the site truly useful is the heavily-linked ingredient lists. So if you're not quite sure whether white pepper can substitute for black, or just what star anise looks like at the store, you can quickly find out. As for the recipes, well, make sure they make a certain amount of sense before devoting time to them, but collaboration can yield some surprisingly great results, too. Foodista is free to use; advanced editing requires a sign-up.

In a New York Times weekend piece, get-it-done foodie Mark Bittman says your tiny kitchen is no excuse for avoiding great home-cooked meals. It's an inspiring read for anyone who's ever felt defeated when seeing all the counter space and shiny metal doo-dads in someone else's kitchen, or wondered if they really have the space to make that three-course meal for friends coming over. In short, Bittman says, you do:

To pretend otherwise -- to spend tens of thousands of dollars or more on a kitchen before learning how to cook, as is sadly common -- is to fall into the same kind of silly consumerism that leads people to believe that an expensive gym membership will get them into shape or the right bed will improve their sex life. As runners run and writers write, cooks cook, under pretty much any circumstance.

Inspiring stuff. For tips on actually getting by with your tiny little space, check our tips on kitchen time-savers that speed up dinner. Bonus quote from Mario Batali: "I can make almost every dish in my restaurants on four crummy electric burners with a regular oven -- as can just about anyone else who cares to." Photo by evelynishere.

If you find the hot sauce spread at your local food emporium a bit lacking, it's time to do it yourself and create a batch of palate-scalding sauce that's just right. Over in the Dining and Wine section of the New York Times, there is a straight forward method for making your own hot sauce. If you have chili peppers, vinegar, a blender and a stove to boil the mixture on, you're in business. Even if you have no intention of cooking up a batch of hot sauce right now the comments from home-brewing hot sauce aficionados are a wealth of information about hot sauce brewing and a fascinating read. Photo by jslander.

With a hot Jacob's Ladder arcing angrily between a pair of wires, Rafael and Max put a thoroughly modern spin on the traditional cheese plate by sending a few thousand volts through a grape and a piece of fromage in this video. Note that the two chefs wear goggles to protect their eyes and non-conductive wooden chopsticks to hold the food. What they don't offer is a taste test. They do, however, offer a winking "Don't try this at home." From coffee warming coils to hot dog electrocutors, what are your favourite ways of cooking with juice?

Windows/Linux: Spend some time searching for free software to manage recipes, and you'll end up spending a lot of time in your uninstaller utility, removing the cruft of bad interfaces, weak features, and general abandonware. Gourmet Recipe Manager, a free, open-source download for Linux and Windows systems, is easy to navigate, imports and exports in a wide array of formats, and can generate nutritional data and shopping lists from your favourite home cooking recipes. The app has a lot of small but convenient features, like a list maker that understands you just need "potatoes," not "diced potatoes," an ingredient entry form that allows for no-look typing, and an attractive recipe card maker. It can also import recipes from Epicurious.com, Recipezaar, and other web sites with little problem. Gourmet Recipe Manager is a free download for Windows and Linux systems. It's included in many Linux repositories, while Windows users should look through the stable releases for the most recent .exe package. Know of another free, robust recipe manager? Tell us about it in the comments.

Personal finance weblog The Simple Dollar explains how to cook a whole chicken and use every last bit of it for a frugal alternative to buying more expensive chicken breasts.

From [$11.50], you can produce a meal of chicken and vegetables to feed a family of four, a meal worth of leftovers, a bag full of chicken pieces in the freezer for a future meal for a family of four, and a bag of chicken stock for another meal or two. That's five complete meals and the key ingredients for eight more meals.

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Frugal money blogger Trent recommends a weekly "soup and bread night" to save on food costs. You don't literally have to eat soup and bread, it can be any kind of meal as long as it's cheap:

if you have one supper per week that's intentionally as cheap as you can possibly make it, you'll save a lot of money over the long run. And, since it's only one meal a week, one can easily just focus on the cheap and not worry that much about taste.

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If you're faced with a recipe that requires you separate some eggs, either for the yolks or the whites, there are several different ways to approach it. Tutorial site WikiHow demonstrates how to use the hand, shell transfer, funnel, and separator methods so no matter how few or many culinary tools you have on hand you can get the job done. Hit the play button above to see how to use the hand method.

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When you're looking for a recipe with certain ingredients or by a particular chef, hit up Five Mushrooms, a multi-recipe site search engine which includes results from Allrecipes.com, the Food Network, Yahoo! Food, Cooking.com and Epicurious among others. Search by ingredients—like carrot celery onion—or specific quantities, like 1 egg, or by chef and ingredient, like emeril beef. You can even use advanced operators like the minus sign to exclude results (i.e., cookies -"chocolate chip"). Where do you turn when you need a good recipe for dinner? Let us know in the comments.

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